When Identity Politics elites decided that victimization of groups of people needed to be dealt with at a more comprehensive manner, they invented “intersectionality”. At the time of the introduction of Identity Politics to the Feminist movement in the late 1970s, the leaders were nearly all White females.
Anti-Feminist University of Ottawa English Professor Janice Fiamengo describes the two-fold effect of mainstream Feminist thought on women:
First, it channels any feelings of dissatisfaction anxiety or resentment or self-dislike that most young people feel at one time of another into anger at male-dominated society which is seen as actively and eternally biased against women.
And second, it creates a powerful, heady and exhilarating rush of euphoria, deeply pleasurable, at perceiving oneself an innocent victim of social forces beyond one’s control.
However, in the early 1990s, non-White and Lesbian Feminists raised the issue that they were more comprehensive victims than privileged, White, heterosexual women.
Fiamengo comments:
All of these powerfully positive feelings [of innocent victimization] are vulnerable to claims made by women in other identity categories, especially lesbians, black women, aboriginal women, and disabled women. Not only is their suffering far more severe that that experienced by white heterosexual women, but even worse that the white heterosexual cis-gender women actually participate in the oppression of these others through their whiteness, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, etc.
This corresponds to the advent of third-wave Feminism, whereby white Feminists were confronted with their blindness to the impact of racism, classism, able-ism, and heterosexism in women’s experience. Fiamengo states the impact:
Psychologically, this is a shattering accusation, threatening all that the white Feminist holds dear in her self-conception. Most fundamentally it takes away her moral innocence, and the intense pleasure she has derived from her victimhood.
So, what to do? After all, the victim claim by the non-white, “other” women was of identical Marxist schema of innocent victim/privileged oppressor. So how could the white Feminist rebut the victim claim of the “others” without at the same time losing their own victimized identity?
This dilemma and its solution are labeled “Intersectionality”. The resolution involves quite complicated and even incoherent calculations of degrees of victimization and complicity. Fiamengo explains:
In practice, essentially, white Feminist guilt for white privilege or hetero privilege is acknowledged or even embraced. Since the deflection of blame is always the end goal of the feminine psychosis, that is achieved in this case by accepting — and then renouncing — privilege through confession and contrition. Confession involves — as we have often seen — public acknowledgment; the ritual announcement of one’s sources of privilege. And contrition involves attacks on the externalized source of that privilege, whether it be racist patriarchy, hetero patriarchy, western colonial patriarchy, etc.
Thus, the white Feminist reclaims her temporarily lost moral innocence by focusing with ever greater fury on white able-bodies hetero cis-gendered male villainy, and declaring her allegiance with its various victims: the non-western “other”, the sexually marginalized, and so on. She becomes innocent again by becoming a victim advocate for her brown and lesbian sisters, and even in some cases brothers.
Critique: Intersectionality is recipe for multiple contradictions, but since Feminism is based on Postmodernism, logic and coherence are never a priority. The attempt to fractionate victimization can go on endlessly. For example, how can one possibly calculate AT THE GROUP LEVEL who is most oppressed? Is a man who is 1/4th Black and 50% Hispanic, with a disabled 2-year old child more – or less – oppressed than a 100% Native American woman with a prodigy child and an alcoholic grandfather? Because, according to intersectionality, one of those two is more privileged than the other, and thus actually oppresses the other with their privilege. Whichever one that is will need to confess their privilege to the other, and then advocate for their victim status, in order to achieve coveted Postmodern innocence. How does one build a cohesive society on that kind of paradigm?
Further, the problem that intersectionality is attempting to solve, is itself a fraudulent construct. The Postmodern/neo-Marxist model of oppressor/oppressed, or privileged/victim is itself incomprehensively over-simplified. First of all, the so-called “groups” are made up of individuals, and each person has their own combination of victimization and privilege. Further, beyond both of those concepts are issues of competence, conscientiousness, acceptance of responsibility, choices, addictions, suffering, and ultimately death. To reduce life to a Marxist model of power and their drive to equity is a recipe for totalitarianism of the kind seen in the Marxist regimes of the 20th century, which is to say, mayhem, enslavement, misery, death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. How can rational people have anything to do with such an ideology, other than oppose, discredit, and dismantle?